Mother, Come Home by Paul Hornschemeier

With clean, distinctive art and poignant storytelling, this is a quietly stunning tale of a father and son struggling, by varying degrees of escapism and fantasy, to come to terms with the death of the boy's mother. Mother, Come Home is Paul Hornschemeier’s piercing graphic-novel debut and secured the cartoonist’s place as one of his generation’s most skillful and ambitious practitioners, and proved a harbinger of the subject matter that the artist would go on to explore most consistently in later work: the nuclear family.

slow and sad, then more devastation

This one is difficult, but I enjoy that. I did not enjoy the beginning, but I did like seeing the difficult story through the eyes of 7yro Thomas. The ending of the book where the father goes along with his son's 'escape plan' is endearing and a great act of parenthood, the escape from his guilt which he then gives to his son is a little too much like A Separate Peace for my taste, but it's complex and something I'm not entirely sure what to do with. I hate the father for giving his son such guilt, yet am capable of attempting to understand his suicide and his parallel with his wife's situation where she sought death but in her sickness could not attain it on her own terms. So he assists her, and has his own 'assistance'.